Whew, this day was a doozy! There’s a lot of the plot behind the plot unfolding now, and Vosler’s true intentions and plans are coming to light. Was Earth really a place for people without fetches to live in peace? And is it really going to take an entire year to get everyone in a fetch?

Not if Vosler has anything to say about it.

Word Count: 50,745

When the doors had fully opened, Maiya’s first reaction was to destroy the room she’d been working in so that nobody could seal up the doors while we were in there. She took a couple of terminals and, with a few swift keystrokes, shattered the entire room. Virtual glass and tile and stone flew everywhere, before disappearing without a trace, obfuscating the room from my view for a moment. When the shards faded away, what was left was nothing short of miraculous.

It towered above us many hundreds of times over; its sheer size was not only unexpected, but blindingly surprising. We felt like we had walked into the largest planetarium man had ever built – The Collective made its home in this humongous, spherical room; a walkway was placed about one fourth of the way up the sphere, allowing pedestrians to enter. The walkway, shimmering with the reflections of the structure that was The Collective, brought my attention upward.

Ten hulking, metal beams, evenly distributed and no doubt several feet thick apiece, adorned a humongous sphere in the center of the room, holding it to the walls of the spherical room. The beams shot past me and borrowed beneath the floor, striking whatever was beneath it. The sphere from which these beams jutted forth filled nearly the entire room, leaving only enough room for a hallway spanning the circumference of the structure.

From there my attention was brought to the walls of this room. Adorning them, like ornamental gems on a ring, were thousands upon thousands of cryogenic tubes like those I had seen earlier. It was through those tubes, and elsewhere most likely, that people entered and left The Collective. I could see from the entrance that several of the tubes were currently occupied.

Maiya approached the room from behind me, her mouth gaping in awe of Vosler’s work. Not speaking, only walking more slowly toward the gigantic sphere in the center of the room, she appeared to me as a ghost floating ever closer toward its missed purpose in life, as if by merely observing The Collective she might be flung forth to heaven in an instant. I grabbed her left wrist as she walked by, holding her back. Light as a feather, she stopped walking when she felt my tug, defaulting to a stupefied standstill.

“This is remarkable,” she managed to murmur.

“Yeah,” I said, affirming her statement.

“All this time, Marshall had this already made… it must be able to hold an entire continent’s worth of people.”

“Or an entire planet’s worth. You seriously think he may have built more than one of these? If the rasase collapses the planet, and everyone’s in a fetch, the whole world goes into this thing. Gone without a trace. And Vosler’ll be happy as a clam. Don’t lose sight of what’s in front of you, Maiya. Even if it’s beyond your wildest dreams.”

“It’s just…”

“Just what?”

“Nothing,” she said. “You’re right. But we can’t just destroy this thing. It’s too large. We’ll need another way – perhaps we can just disable it.” We both began looking around for any sort of switch or terminal that might control part or all of The Collective’s hardware. Oddly enough, we found our terminal right up against The Collective itself. Maiya immediately began working her magic to access the optioned buried within the terminal’s software.

“Huh,” I heard her say. She continued fiddling with the terminal, grunting a few times in frustration.

“What is it?” I asked.

“He blocked my access,” she said. “Vosler. He probably had done this from the start, so that I couldn’t tamper with The Collective. There’s nothing either of us can do to turn it off manually. And, come to think of it, even if we did manage to turn off this giant container – what would happen to all of the people inside?”

“You know more than me,” I said. “I don’t have a clue about this technology.”

“Well, I’ve never shut off any of the prototypes, though presumably if I did it would still function as a storage medium. Unfortunately, it would only function as such – no data would be able to flow in or out of the device, and the substrate inside would essentially freeze. Even if the souls could move around, they’d simply continue congealing until they were one superconsciousness, incapable of separating itself into its former individual components. I suppose, in simpler terms, everyone inside would be effectively killed.”

“Well, that nukes that plan. So what can we do? We can’t turn this off if we want to save the people inside – at least, those who still have their individuality intact.” I said this to her, secretly hoping that Derek was one of those people. Those few, lucky people who could separate themselves out of The Collective before it was too late. I thought about how we could preserve The Collective while destroying its purpose – save the people inside and outside.

Maiya was busy staring at the beams that jutted out of The Collective’s metallic structure. “They go into the walls,” she muttered to herself. “Vince, I don’t think these beams are just for structural support.” She darted her head around the room, then held up a head and began tracing lines around the walls. “I think the beams actually extend around the room. They’re probably surrounding the place.”

“So the entire core is structurally independent. It makes sense – if the planet collapses on itself, Vosler would want The Collective to retain its structural integrity. I’d hazard a guess that the beams also surround the entire Renaissance facility, assuming that Vosler wants to keep working on The Collective after the planet collapses. It works out – he has a virtually unlimited source of power.”

That drove Maiya – the thought of souls being transformed into energy for Vosler’s research.

“I think,” I said, “that our best bet is to try and clear up the rasase injections around Cydia. That will at least stop the remaining Slate from dissolving and keep Cydia intact while we work out a way to destroy The Collective safely.”

“He really has turned the entire core of our planet into nothing but a housing for souls,” Maiya said grimly, “I still can’t believe it.” She hung her head down, refusing to look at the massive structure in front of her. Was this a side of Maiya I had never seen before – the side that showed weakness?

With heavy resolve, she nodded and tossed away the terminal that had been floating in front of her. She spoke as it shattered, “You’re right. We’d better get out of here, then. I don’t want to get caught up with more of the wrong people.” This time, she grabbed my wrist, and dragged me along as we left Cydia’s core. But before we could leave, a bloody figure appeared in the doorway, cast almost entirely in shadow, a thick, oily liquid dripping from one of its arms. As it walked every closer, I began to make out a face – the face of a man I hadn’t seen in a long time.

With great surprise, I called to the man. “Adam Curie,” I shouted, “where the hell have you been?” I smiled for the first time in hours, days, who knew how long, and ran at Curie.

He backed away before I could touch him. “Don’t,” he said. “I’m a bloody mess. And what in God’s name is this place?”

Maiya turned her head away from me and Curie, not looking at The Collective either – not really looking at anything, hoping that she could leave as soon as humanly possible. But from the look on Curie’s face, that wasn’t going to happen just yet. “What’s wrong?” I said, noticing that his serious expression hadn’t changed.

“I followed your footprints here. You left me behind. They were going to kill me. Send me to The Collective.”

“Well, it looks like they succeeded. That’s where you are now, Curie.”

“I noticed. So what are we going to do about it?”

“Nothing we can do, I’m afraid. What’s going on – what’s happened to you? You really are a bloody mess.”

“I escaped,” he said, out of breath a bit from walking and losing so much blood. “I found some grenades laying around and blew up the lab so I could get away. A few cuts and scrapes, nothing serious. Just a lot of blood. You’re pretty bloody yourself.”

“I got in a scuffle with one of Maiya’s old coworkers.”

“Huh,” Curie said. “Did he have this on him, then?” He reached into his pocket and pulled out a gun – the same gun Vosler had pointed at my head and that Maiya had told me to toss aside like a worthless piece of garbage.”

“That thing?” Maiya said, stepping forward and staring Curie down, point blank in his eyes. “Yeah, Vosler had that hunk of junk with him. It’s worthless, nothing but a crappy gun.”

“You’d think that, if you had no idea what you were talking about. But this gun doesn’t come from Cydia – at least, I don’t think it does.” I recalled asking Vosler where the gun came from and its significance to him.

“That checks out” I interjected. “Right before Maiya killed Marshall Vosler – the man carrying that gun – he was about to tell me where it came from. I knew it looked strange when I was fighting him, but I was just using it as a way to stall time. I didn’t think it had any serious significance.”

“Wait – Vosler? The Marshall Vosler?”

“So you’ve heard of him.”

“Who the hell hasn’t heard of him? He runs Inland and pioneered the fetch.”

Maiya scoffed at him, almost about to rebuke his statement, but I cut her off. “Small world, I suppose. But still, the gun seemed worthless to me, although strange and a bit intriguing.”

“The gun alone probably is, but where it’s from is definitely significant. And from the looks of it, this gun came straight from Earth. That on its own still has very little meaning – but if this gun is here, that means there’s a Corpus Lock somewhere in the Renaissance facility.”

“He could have brought the gun underground with him,” Maiya said.

“I suppose, but the grenades I used to blow up the lab were crafted in a manner similar to this gun. That’s why I picked it up when I saw it laying on the ground. I’ve got some grenades here, too.” He reached into his pockets and dug up two grenades, both designed in the style of the gun. Wary of the damage he could do holding those weapons, I asked him if he’d put them away. “Sure,” he said. “But there’s definitely a Corpus Lock down here – and I thought you two might be headed toward it. I figured those footprints were yours, since it doesn’t seem like anyone down here is out to disobey their orders. And a dead man lying around sure seems like that.”

I looked at Maiya. “We haven’t been being very discreet, I suppose.” I sighed, unsure what to make of the Corpus Lock, but knowing that the pieces would fall into place with time. Confused, I motioned for everyone to leave the planet’s core and go back into the hallway. Curie, Maiya and I steadily made our way out, leaving behind the dimly lit monstrosity that was The Collective.

Maiya closed the doors to The Collective while Curie spoke. “We all know that there’s an effort in the government to make contact with Earth. I’m pretty sure that whoever is heading that effort is taking resources from Earth and bringing them back to Cydia – namely, weaponry and metal resources.”

Then it hit me – the man I’d overheard talking on Earth was Vosler. It was his shitty smile, his coifed hair that had seemed so familiar to me when he’d showed up to kill me. “No,” I said, “that’s not it. That can’t be it.” I shook my head.

Dumbfounded, Curie questioned why that was.

“When I went to Earth – back when we first met – I overheard Vosler and another man talking about why they had gone to Earth. It seemed like they were going to use it as a habitable alternative to Cydia for those who didn’t want to be in fetches. He was convincing this man that fetches were the future, that everyone would be in one in a year’s time or less.”

Maiya shook her head. “It seems like it’s going to be significantly less than a year at the rate people are being captured. And they’re on the market, too. Besides, it’s just like Vosler to lie about this entire operation – we’ve already seen him cover up The Collective as a medical initiative. Why not cover up Earth as a cushy, alternative place to live? It would certainly free him up to mine the place dry.”

Now I was as dumbfounded as Curie – and letting the pieces fall into place on their own was beginning to frustrate me. Once again, I yearned for my old life back – the simple mining life I’d worked so hard to make for myself. I wanted Derek back. I wanted to forget Maiya and Curie and Vosler and Marco. None of these people had any place in my life. But now, here I was – at the very core of Cydia! – with those very people. I wanted to forget about Earth. But now, here I was, discussing the very subject.

Beautiful though it was, I knew I couldn’t save two planets if it came to that. But if Earth was the source of Vosler’s extra resources, then I also knew that I had to confront the issue at some point. And I decided that I would let Curie determine that point for me. I obliged him, at that moment. “Let’s go find that Corpus Lock, then,” I said, and motioned for the group to move forward.